Whatever.

On April 23, 1635, the first public school in what would become the United States was established in Boston, Massachusetts.

Taught.

PERNICIOUS.—A young man can be most surely corrupted when he is taught to value the like-minded more highly than the differently minded.

Friedrich Nietzsche, from The Dawn of Day

Quirky.

People who read too many books get quirky. We can't have too much eccentricity or it would bankrupt us. Market research [as well as curriculum and corporate standardized assessments - Ed.] depends on people behaving as if they were all alike.

John Taylor Gatto, from The Underground History of American Education: An Intimate Investigation Into the Prison of Modern Schooling

Acting.

The nature of psychological compulsion is such that those who act under constraint remain under the impression that they are acting on their own initiative. The victim of mind-manipulation does not know that he is a victim. To him the walls of his prison are invisible, and he believes himself to be free. That he is not free is apparent only to other people. His servitude is strictly objective.

Aldous Huxley, from Brave New World

Look.

Hollowed.

Caravaggio, Narcissus, 1596

It's true ...

Above all, the one overarching lesson that students receive is the true end of education: the only essential knowledge is that know ourselves to be radically autonomous selves within a comprehensive global system with a common commitment to mutual indifference. Our commitment to mutual indifference is what binds us together as a global people. Any remnant of a common culture would interfere with this prime directive:  a common culture would imply that we share something thicker, an inheritance that we did not create, and a set of commitments that imply limits and particular devotions.

Ancient philosophy and practice praised as an excellent form of government a res publica – a devotion to public things, things we share together. We have instead created the world’s first Res Idiotica – from the Greek word idiotes, meaning “private individual.” Our education system produces solipsistic, self-contained selves whose only public commitment is an absence of commitment to a public, a common culture, a shared history. They are perfectly hollowed vessels, receptive and obedient, without any real obligations or devotions.

They won’t fight against anyone, because that’s not seemly, but they won’t fight for anyone or anything either. They are living in a perpetual Truman Show, a world constructed yesterday that is nothing more than a set for their solipsism, without any history or trajectory.

Thank you, Kurt. 

Forever.

In a recent post, Kurt points to an article on a form of mass-murder being committed in classrooms today.

In the movie, Amadeus, there is a spirited dialog that Mozart has with Baron Von Swieten over themes and appropriate content for the masses ...

VON SWIETEN

Mozart, music is not the issue here.  No one doubts your talent. It is  your judgment of literature that's in question. Even with the politics taken out, this thing would still remain a vulgar farce. Why waste your spirit on such rubbish?  Surely you can choose more elevated themes?

MOZART

Elevated?  What does that mean?  Elevated! The only thing a man should elevate is - oh, excuse me. I'm sorry.  I'm stupid. But I am fed up to the teeth with elevated things! Old dead  legends! How can we go on forever writing about gods and legends?

VON SWIETEN (aroused)

Because they do. They go on forever - at least what they represent. The eternal in us, not the ephemeral. Opera is here to ennoble us. You and me, just as much as His Majesty.

It's always been happening, the battle continues today, and the good guys are losing, horribly.

Being a sixth-grade teacher, I'm privileged to have a front row seat for some of the most vulgar, rightfully childish, but genuinely funny behavior I've ever witnessed -- I consider it a perk of my position.  To return the favor, I'm an evangelist for Mozart, Caravaggio, and Stevenson.  Missionary work takes perseverance and patience, key to conversion being experience, which leads to dialog, which leads to exploration, which leads to choice, which leads to understanding and growth.

This is where the battle is being lost.  Kids are missing experiences with greatness.  I took my sixth-grade class to a school-sponsored book fair recently and was saddened (though not shocked) to see that there wasn't a single volume of classic literature among the offerings.  My classroom is thought to be a rarity, an exception, a "nerd clubhouse," even an oddity, sometimes called inappropriate for the age I teach because of the types of literature, music, and art that we explore, discuss, and think about.  Students today know nothing about Jim Hawkins, Medusa, and the Jupiter Symphony because not only have their parents missed those boats, but their teachers have as well (see a recent post on the value of real music).  

In an effort to devote more time to reading and math, our district has decided to cut the time devoted to science and social studies taught in a year in half -- one semester of science, one semester of social studies.  And still, I defy you to find a copy of Kidnapped, The Last of the Mohicans, or The Wind in the Willows on a classroom bookshelf, let alone in the library, er -- excuse me -- Media Center.

Sir Philip Pullman says that the best way to teach kids the value of good literature isn't to drill them with lessons on plot sequence, character types, and conflict, but to leave good literature lying around to be explored, without surveillance, without judgement, without commitment, in hopes that kids will find a lifeline and grab hold.  This might be the only hope. 

Kids need to be told stories, not by appeasers, but by crusaders who care about their hearts and souls, by those willing to use courage and take the time to read to kids, sing to kids, dance to Mozart with kids; showing the not only The Way, but the purpose and the benefit of The Way.

A scene from Dead Poets Society ...

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion.

Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are all noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life.  But poetry, beauty,  romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman:

"O me, o life of the questions of these recurring, 

Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities filled with the foolish …

What good amid these, o me, o life? 

Answer: 

That you are here. That life exists, and identity.

That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse ...

Rattle.

WIRED on how the pandemic created "a new, more diverse, more connected crop of homeschoolers. They could help shape what learning looks like for everyone"...

Families shared a number of forces that drove them away from public and private schools. Some were exhausted by the glitchy mayhem of remote learning. Other BFHES families pulled their children from schools after they overheard how teachers spoke to their children, admonishing students who didn’t maintain eye contact or keep cameras on ...

But when it comes to actually deciding how to allot each hour in a child’s learning day, parents are pretty much given carte blanche. This could be a barrier for parents considering homeschooling: Building a curriculum from scratch can be daunting, especially when you multiply the effort for each kid. But especially in the extremely online Covid era, curriculum resources are as bottomless as the internet itself. Parents describe their homegrown curriculum design the way one might rattle off a cocktail recipe: practice worksheets from ABCMouse.com, videos from TED Talks for Kids, and a few minutes of the Happy Learning YouTube channel, for garnish ... 

“It makes me feel proud of myself,” she says. “It makes me feel like I did something right.”

CONNECT

It's new.

Feel proud.  You deserve it.  

Don't forget Teachers Pay Teachers for those worksheets.  Oh, and stickers, kids love stickers.  They'll make work in the "obliteration room" so totally, like, post-worthy.  

Doomed.

On April 23, 1635, the first public school in what would become the United States was established in Boston, Massachusetts.

Captive.

If a captive mind is unaware of being in prison, it is living in error. If it has recognized the fact, even for the tenth of a second, and then quickly forgotten it in order to avoid suffering, it is living in falsehood. Men of the most brilliant intelligence can be born, live and die in error and falsehood.

Simone Weil

Suddenly.

A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence.

Jean-François Revel

Thank you, Kurt.

Evolution.

Thanks to The Man in the Green Shirt.

Exalts.

It's rather the possibility of friendship, unencumbered by feelings of attraction or shyness; the possibility of working on the same wavelength, as it were, with someone who understands you because he's a boy as you are, or a girl as you are. Committee work stifles the imagination, because people have to work down to the common denominator of what would be minimally acceptable to everyone. But friendship exalts the imagination. Indeed it is one of the things that the ancients said friendship was for. Plato suggests in Symposium that one of the highest forms of friendship is one whose love issues forth in beautiful and virtuous deeds, for thus "the partnership between [the friends] will be far closer and the bond of affection far stronger than between ordinary parents, because the children that they share surpass human children by being immortal as well as more beautiful.

Anthony Esolen, from Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

Good.

Thanks, Wendy.

Believe.

Call me Mr. Gatto, please. Twenty-six years ago, having nothing better to do at the time, I tried my hand at schoolteaching. The license I hold certifies that I am an instructor of English language and English literature, but that isn't what I do at all. I don't teach English, I teach school -- and I win awards doing it.

Teaching means different things in different places, but seven lessons are universally taught from Harlem to Hollywood Hills. They constitute a national curriculum you pay for in more ways than you can imagine, so you might as well know what it is. You are at liberty, of course, to regard these lessons any way you like, but believe me when I say I intend no irony in this presentation. These are the things I teach, these are the things you pay me to teach. Make of them what you will.

John Taylor Gatto

CONNECT

Original.

I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don't really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers to care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic -- it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.

Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly.

Whatever an education is, it should make you a unique individual, not a conformist; it should furnish you with an original spirit with which to tackle the big challenges; it should allow you to find values which will be your roadmap through life; it should make you spiritually rich, a person who loves whatever you are doing, wherever you are, whomever you are with; it should teach you what is important, how to live and how to die.

John Taylor Gatto, from Dumbing us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

Obligation.

The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainly not to be trusted.

John Taylor Gatto, from Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling

Time.

Let school be the eater of time.

Thanks, Kurt.

Plan.

This is why I’m so passionately against the notion that children should make a plan before writing stories at school. Don’t! Write the story first. See what you’ve got and then you can make a plan. They’re taught by idiots who don’t know how to do it themselves. It’s like saying, “I’m going to teach you to play the piano. I can’t play the piano myself, but this note is C … now you start playing Chopin.” It’s just stark, flaming ignorance.

What angers me now is that in order to acquire a sort of humane education where you’re allowed to enjoy books and experience the arts, you have to be the child of rich parents. There’s no problem with the artistic and aesthetic education you get if you go to Eton or Winchester. But if you go to St Swine’s Academy, run by some carpet manufacturer somewhere, you have to do what the government tells you, and then it’s all about these SATs and tests and the imposition of trivial rubbish like fronted adverbials. If you’re not the sort of child who thrives in exams then you’re written off. The cruelty passes belief. It’s based on a lack of empathy, lack of basic decency on the part of the government.

Philip Pullman

Begin.

The tragedy of industrial schooling is made all the worse by the promise of education, the promise of drawing us out, leading us forth. As midwives attending to the births of their students, teachers carry an awesome responsibility with correspondingly awesome possibilities. Education, if it is to be worthy of its true meaning, can, should, and must be at the forefront of resistance to the routine dehumanization of our whole industrialized mass culture. That is possible. I have done it. So have others. But it is rare. Too many teachers, like too many students, too many workers at too many war manufacturing plants, too many writers, too many politicians, too many people who could be human beings but who have been trained by their schooling and by their work and by their pursuit of money and their pursuit of acceptance and by their very real fear of being who they are step away from this responsibility, and in so doing lead themselves and those around them ever farther from their hearts, and lead us all ever closer to the personal and planetary annihilation that is the looming end point of industrial civilization.

If one of the most unforgivable sins is to lead people away from themselves, we must not forgive the processes of industrial education.

There is, however, an alternative. Or rather, there are as many alternatives as there are people, and most especially as there are people engaged in active, thoughtful relationships with their communities, which includes their living landbases, the land where they live, the land that supports and nourishes them.

I’ve heard it said that within our deathly culture, the most revolutionary thing anyone can do is follow one’s heart. I would add that once you’ve begun to do that—to follow your own heart—the most moral and revolutionary thing you can do is help others find their hearts, to find themselves. It’s much easier than it seems.

Time is short. It’s short for our planet—the planet that is our home—that is being killed while we stand by. And it is even shorter for all of those students whose lives are slipping away from them with every awful tick of the clock on the classroom wall.

There is much work to be done. What are you waiting for? It’s time to begin.

Derrick Jensen, from Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution